At the official opening event of its Beijing office, Symbian Ltd announced the introduction of POSIX libraries on Symbian OSâ„¢, which will significantly reduce the effort required to migrate existing desktop and server components, and mobile applications from other platforms, onto Symbian OS.
P.I.P.S. – ‘PIPS is POSIX on Symbian’- enables easy migration of desktop and server applications to smartphones.
The move will help broaden and deepen application development for Symbian OS and help improve developer productivity. Symbian OS is the market leading operating system for smartphones.
P.I.P.S. – PIPS Is POSIX on Symbian – will enable C programmers to more easily migrate existing middleware and applications, either commercial or open source, to Symbian OS by providing standard POSIX C APIs on Symbian OS. This has been achieved by supplying a new framework of POSIX C APIs for use by both C and C++ programmers. The new APIs are packaged into industry standard libraries – libc, libm, libpthread and libdl – and are tightly integrated with Symbian OS to optimise performance and memory usage. In addition, an updated tool chain will further reduce migration effort.
“Symbian smartphones are becoming increasingly powerful, and it is now realistic and desirable to migrate desktop and server code onto mobile devices, opening up exciting possibilities and attracting differently skilled developers to the Symbian ecosystemâ€, said Jørgen Behrens, executive vice-president, marketing, Symbian. “With P.I.P.S., Symbian further demonstrates its commitment to open standards in the industry.â€
Source: Symbian One
I smell another code break in the upcoming months. I think it’s for the better, imagine having desktop and server class applications on your mobile phone. That’s something to think about really hard.